In about 1890, the United Brethren Church investigated Kearney as a doable web site for a denominational academy. Town rallied across the idea and although it  provided a 25-acre tract as a web site and even provided monetary support to start development, the church as an alternative situated its faculty in York.

In 1891, the Episcopal Church, headed by Rev. Anson Graves, picked the Kearney web site and established the coeducational Platte Collegiate Institute of Greater Training in Kearney’s East Garden space. Graves turned the college’s principal, with Clarence A. Murch and his spouse Marcia becoming a member of the educating employees. At just about the identical time, the Episcopal Church established the Worthington Academy north of Lincoln, which burned and closed six years later.

Courses at Kearney started in September of 1892, with many college students arriving on town’s new electrical streetcars. The campus held “three massive and handy buildings” and hosted 9 departments, together with school prep. Tuition for a 40-week 12 months was set at $120, paid prematurely, or a 10-week time period tuition of $10 plus $5 for room and $20 for board.

The varsity survived the 1893 despair, which closed many establishments, with “beneficiant assist from the East” however within the fall of 1898, modified its instructional philosophy, turning into the Kearney Army Academy for Boys. Curiously, just a few holdover ladies had been additionally allowed to stay below the brand new director, Rev. E.P. Chittenden.

In late 1900, the Omaha World-Herald reported {that a} disagreement between Chittenden and Professor Russell escalated right into a “large-scale mutiny.” Russell and about 40 college students and a few college members stormed off the campus and headed for the Halfway Lodge. Russell submitted his resignation, claiming he had not been pretty handled and introduced he would set up a brand new faculty.

Graves intervened, and after an investigation, decided Chittenden’s explosive mood had compelled various college students to be expelled. Chittenden resigned and Russell was reinstated.

The varsity rebounded, and by 1905 enrollment had elevated to the purpose that college students searching for admission needed to be turned away. Responding to the expansion, F.G. Keens donated $10,000, which was matched by a Mrs. Cochran, permitting development of a brand new constructing named Cochran Corridor.

The $50,000, three-story, bolstered concrete-and-brick, electrically illuminated and steam-heated corridor included the headmaster’s quarters, an infirmary, chapel and rooms for 80 cadets. The corridor was accomplished in December of 1906 and devoted Jan. 1, 1907, with a speech by William Jennings Bryan.

Maybe the college’s most well-known pupil was Dwight Palmer Griswold, who was born in Harrison in 1893, graduated from Gordon Excessive Faculty, attended Kearney Army Academy in 1910, was elected to the Nebraska Home in 1920, the Nebraska Senate in 1925, turned Nebraska’s twenty fifth governor in 1940 and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1952.

Through the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, 87 college students had been bothered and 5 died. Enrollment dropped as World Warfare I ended, and from 1919 to 1923, three buildings suffered extreme fireplace injury and the college closed.

Professor Murch opened a enterprise faculty within the Kearney Opera Home that lasted 10 years, closing because the Kearney Regular Faculty opened. The Army Academy, in the meantime, sat empty till it was given to town of Kearney, with the buildings reworked as a N.Y.A. youth camp and studying heart.

As World Warfare II wound down, prisoners of warfare had been seen as a approach to meet the U.S. Warfare Division’s farm manufacturing objectives, inflicting about 18 small German POW camps to open in Nebraska. About 300 prisoners had been housed on the 35-acre Kearney Army Academy below Lt. Napier, who initiated treating the prisoners as males as an alternative of cattle, with nice outcomes.

Farmers within the Gibbon space contracted for the entire Kearney prisoners for the spring of 1945, however by the 12 months’s finish, the entire Nebraska department camps had been closed.

In 1948, the college was once more renovated, turning into St. Luke’s Lutheran Hospital, which closed in 1952, then was transformed to a retirement dwelling in 1953. By 1973 it was dwelling to 126 residents and right now is operated by the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society,  with solely the oft-remodeled Cochran Corridor remaining from the outdated navy academy.